


Tinseltown

by KuroiSei



Category: DRAMAtical Murder
Genre: M/M, Multi, crappy party island au, from sei's point of view, guess what aoba is, hella yes, i dare you, sheltered teen gets the shock of his life, the final realisation of my crappy party au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-13
Updated: 2014-11-13
Packaged: 2018-02-25 05:46:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2610662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KuroiSei/pseuds/KuroiSei
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sei has spent most of his life in hospital, suffering from a serious illness with only his family to keep him company and give him a window into the outside world. And that’s a very small window, as our twenty-three year old protagonist is about to find out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tinseltown

_Wake me up before you go-go / I don’t wanna miss it when you hit that high_

“Sei? Are you awake? You have a visitor.”

“I’m good. Let them in.”

The door slid open and clicked shut at the signal of approaching footsteps. Sei looked up from his twentieth reread of Pride and Prejudice and smiled. Aoba. He’d missed Aoba so much lately. Maybe he had more books for him? He looked dazzling as always, his carefree electric blue hair flitting about his face like excitable sparks and his golden eyes brimming with light – but today, something was different. He walked with a charged step, and his smile was held aloft by a mischievous air that he had not possessed before.

“I’ve got a surprise for you, nii-san!”

“I told you, Aoba, I’m sick and tired of reading romance novels. I know you seemed to think that Twilight was a literary classic, but I’m pretty sure you’re the only one in the universe that seems to think that.”

Aoba swiped Pride and Prejudice out of Sei’s hands with an embarrassed blush, replacing it with something completely different altogether. A travel guide? He sighed and brought it down to rest on his lap as he shuffled upwards to a sitting stance.

“Aoba I already told you that I can’t travel.”

Aoba lit up like a hundred Christmas trees, shaking his head excitedly.

“Well now you can. The nurses told me that your rehab would be over and you’d be discharged fully next week. They thought you might want to know from your family, to make it a better surprise, ya know?”

Sei was taken aback. He hadn’t heard a thing about this. And surely that was against hospital rules? No, even if it was, Aoba had means. He always had means.

“So what’s this for?” He held the book aloft by his fingertips, inspecting it like a child inspecting a bowl of colourful vegetables. He was still puzzled.

“Why, it’s for you, nii-san. You need to brush up on your Greek for our little vacation.”

“V-vacation? Where?”

“Over in Europe – you know that island that I work at all summer? Well, you’re accompanying me to celebrate your getting out of hospital. You need some time in the sun to get rid of that sick-person look you got going on-” Aoba poked Sei’s arm and fiddled with the sleeves of his hospital gown. “The vampire look doesn’t suit you, brother.”

“It suits Edward Cullen though, doesn’t it?” Sei taunted. “You know, your sparkly boyfriend with the obsession with eating mountain lions and creeping on teenage girls with an inferiority complex.”

“That’s it, you’ve gone too far now.” Aoba snarled, blushing furiously and snatching the book away from Sei’s hands. “That was a different time. Those were dark days, I say. Dark days.”

“But that’s ok, because you have your sparkly-butt boyfriend to light it all up, don’t ya, Aoba.” Sei smirked, grasping Aoba’s hands in his and looking straight at him for dramatic effect. Aoba fought back the urge to punch his brother in the face, tightening his fist into a ball and taking his feigned anger out on one of the giant stuffed teddies that Sei’s uncle Toue had left him over the years. This one was huge and brown and took over pretty much half the bed, seeming to stare down at even Sei himself with glassy black eyes. Creepy. Aoba shuddered, turning back to face Sei with a renewed confidence.

“Yep. Yes I do.” Aoba sighed. Technically he was right. He did have a sparkly-butt boyfriend. Ren once snooped around in Aoba’s makeup bags and pulled out some body glitter, marvelling at it with devilishly curious eyes and asking to ‘see how it worked’ on him. The damned bastard knew already, but nothing could stop him from dusting it all over Aoba’s body and proceeding to lick some of it off afterwards in a fit of impulse.

_“Ren, you weirdo. It’s not fucking edible. It’s probably gonna stay in your digestive system, like, forever. Good luck with that. Ew.”_

That being said, it had felt damned good. But in the eternal words of Professor Oak _, “now is not the time to use that”._ Scratch that. There will _never_ be a time to use that. _Ever. Again._ Ren’s wondrously inefficient digestive system practically made him shit sparkles for the next week. It was weird as fuck.

“Say,” Sei said, staring out of the window, “What’s it like out there at that island? Is it sunny?”

Aoba snapped out of his glittery sparkle train of thought, looking Sei in the eyes with a genuine smile and repositioning himself next to Sei on the hospital bed to open up the guidebook for the both of them. It landed on a map.

“So… Here’s the town where I work,” His index finger flitted across the page, tracing little lines on the map in all sorts of directions in a reassuringly familiar motion, “And this is the shopping district, where Mink works. And right there is the party district. That’s where I work. We’ll be staying round about…” He tentatively circled a little square with his finger, “Here. In the residential district. It’s really calm, nii-san, you’d like it a lot, I’m sure.”

Sei was a little ashamed to admit that he had zoned out for the most part after Aoba’s indication of where his first trip away from home was to be located. He drifted in and out of attentiveness, hearing flickers of sound and word but not fully focusing due to his sheer surprise. He caught a ‘stunning beaches’ here, and a ‘the nightlife is to die for’ there, and a little bit of ‘You gotta remember to pack the sun cream, ok?’ there. Advice to take caution studded his every sentence, but Aoba reassured him that he knew the place pretty darn well, and no one dared to mess with him anyways. And yet Aoba always seemed so quiet and mild towards his family. Interesting. That was something he was going to have to look into.

~~~

Packing wasn’t hard: Aoba pretty much did it all himself for fear of giving Sei too much work, before moving onto choosing how many items out of the thousands of makeup bags and clothes on hangers he should take. This was a side to Aoba he had never really seen before, Sei thought. Perhaps he’d be able to see who the real Aoba is on this trip? Who knows?

They had been staying at Granny’s place since Sei got out of hospital. Aoba, being the gentleman that he was, had sacrificed his neat little bed for Sei, and his adamant insistence on taking the futon had been sweet to say the least. The two of them pretty much always got on well, meaning that most of the time they had pretty much zero problems, and life for those few days was fuelled with the excitement and peaceful wonder that could only arise in a situation like this. They stayed up late playing video games, helped Granny out with dinner every night, did the washing up together, and sometimes they merely talked alone. Communication was something they’d always valued, after all. Sometimes they’d talk about Ren, Aoba’s long term, long-distance boyfriend who has met him at the island every year without fail since their first meeting and who always has a tradition of bringing a new gift for him every time they meet again at the airport. Ren always seemed to pop up in their conversations, often so frequently and subtly that it almost seemed as if he were in the room himself, and Sei could see Aoba’s silent yearning for him no matter how hard he tried to hide it. Sometimes, if Aoba got a little tipsy and Sei had to tuck him into bed, they’d stay up late and talk drowsily and dreamily about their wildest dreams and desires. The meaning of life somehow arose at one point, but Sei vowed never to bring the matter up again since his rather sincere and honest question somehow set a drunk Aoba off on a trance-like repetition of the number 42, and Sei had read the book enough times to be frankly so sick of the reference that he proceeded to whack Aoba in the face with a pillow until he stopped saying it in that smug drawling voice of his.

But life was fun, and it was great, and it was exciting. And it was about to get a whole lot better.

**Author's Note:**

> yoU KNOW NUFFIN, SEI SNOW
> 
> No but he doesn't. He's about to get the shock of his life.


End file.
